Friday, 20 May 2016

Update of Progress on Voxel Editor

Now that I've mostly recovered I have been getting into some proper improvements to the Voxel Editing project, behold!

There have been some pretty big changes in the programs capabilities :D

This week I have (In roughly chronological order )

Made it so that schematics can include any number of block types in their palette.

allowed addition and deletion of entire block types at once.

Made the main view able to display a detailed isometric render of the whole schematic.

Automatically adapt the scale of the isometric render to fit window size.

...and most obviously added textures from Minecraft!

Of huge assistance has been Sauro Pasquini, he created the isometric Minecraft block images and was kind enough to share them with me. He has also been very helpful in giving feedback about the project and suggesting ways to extend it. Thank you, Sauro for expressing such interest in this project, it really helped me get back to working on it :)

As for what will be coming next, Sauro has created enough isometric block images to display the entire current Minecraft block catalogue, over 200 blocks! :O For now I've focused on getting the blocks from Classic Minecraft into the editor:

Adding all the blocks present in Minecraft will require me to work out how to handle blocks that can be rotated as well as objects which change shape depending on their location. I have some ideas about how to introduce such properties into the block palette, the trick will be to do so while controlling the huge amount of combinations possible once I introduce stairs, fences, half blocks and so on.

I made certain that any previously saved schematic files will still work with the new editor. If a file is lacking information about block textures the program will assume the blocks are wool :3

Wool blocks that it is possible to recolour mind you! Happily the texturing and colour editing tools play nicely together which means I can mess around tweaking the default colours of Minecraft.

My next plans for the Editor will be to clean it up to post a stable version for people to play around with. Of course I'll probably keep playing with it too, only problem is resisting the temptation to stop building and dive into the code to tweak something :P